- Person
- Carl Sagan
- Lived
- 1934–1996
- Field
- Astronomy, planetary science
- From
- American
The story
The two Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, were sent to explore the outer planets and then continue into interstellar space. Like the earlier Pioneer probes, which carried a plaque designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, each would carry a message. The idea came from the project manager, John Casani, who handed the task to Sagan with a budget of $1,500 for six weeks of work and a requirement that the message weigh no more than the Pioneer plaque.
Sagan and his colleagues realised that a metal phonograph record would outlast magnetic tape in space. The result was a 12-inch copper disc plated with gold. Its contents were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Sagan, and the work took almost a year. The team included Drake, Linda Salzman Sagan, Ann Druyan as creative director, the artist Jon Lomberg and Timothy Ferris as producer.
They assembled 116 images showing science, people, animals, landscapes and daily life on Earth, encoded so that they could be rebuilt as pictures. They added natural sounds such as surf, wind, thunder, birdsong and whale song, as well as footsteps and laughter. The record carries spoken greetings in 55 ancient and modern languages, a greeting from United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim and a printed message from President Jimmy Carter. The last greeting in English was spoken by Sagan's six-year-old son Nick. The music ranges from Bach, Mozart and Beethoven to Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, Blind Willie Johnson and traditional music from many cultures. When the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax objected that rock music was adolescent, Sagan replied that there were a lot of adolescents on the planet.
The cover explains, in scientific symbols, how to play the record and decode its pictures, and it repeats the Pioneer pulsar map showing where the spacecraft came from. Sagan called the launch of this bottle into the cosmic ocean something very hopeful about life on this planet.
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have both crossed into interstellar space, still carrying the record, and Voyager 1 is now the most distant human-made object. In 2015 NASA made the record's audio freely available online, so that people on Earth can hear the portrait of humanity that Sagan's team sent to the stars.
Why it matters
The Golden Record captured the diversity of human life in one artefact and still prompts people to reflect on who we are and what we would want to share with the universe.
About Carl Sagan
Brooklyn-born astronomer who explained the Venus greenhouse, helped send humanity’s messages on Pioneer and Voyager, and taught Cosmos viewers worldwide to look at the universe with wonder and doubt.
More about Carl Sagan
- Carl Sagan co-founded the Planetary SocietyIn 1980 Carl Sagan co-founded the Planetary Society and became its first president, building a public movement to support the exploration of space.
- Carl Sagan explained why Venus is a furnaceIn the early 1960s Carl Sagan argued from radio data that Venus's surface was about 500 °C because of a greenhouse effect, a conclusion confirmed by Mariner 2 in 1962.
- Carl Sagan inspired a generation of science communicatorsCarl Sagan invited a 17-year-old Neil deGrasse Tyson to Cornell and taught Bill Nye astronomy, inspiring a generation of scientists and science popularisers.
- Carl Sagan showed Mars's changing colours were dustMany astronomers thought seasonal colour changes on Mars were spreading vegetation. Carl Sagan showed they were shifts in surface dust driven by windstorms.
- Carl Sagan asked Voyager to photograph the Pale Blue DotAt Carl Sagan's urging, Voyager 1 turned its camera homeward on February 14, 1990, and photographed Earth from about 6 billion kilometres away as a tiny pale blue dot.
- Carl Sagan designed humanity's first message to the starsGiven just three weeks by NASA, Carl Sagan and Frank Drake designed the Pioneer plaque, a message to any alien finders, now leaving the solar system aboard two spacecraft.
- Carl Sagan made the search for alien life respectableIn 1982 Carl Sagan published a petition in the journal Science supporting the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, signed by 70 scientists including seven Nobel laureates.
- Carl Sagan foresaw ocean worlds on Titan and EuropaCarl Sagan was among the first to suggest that Saturn's moon Titan might have surface liquids and that Jupiter's moon Europa might hide an ocean of water beneath its ice.
- Carl Sagan warned Congress about climate change in 1985Drawing on his study of Venus, Carl Sagan testified to the US Congress in 1985 that the greenhouse effect would change Earth's climate.
- Kip Thorne helped Carl Sagan imagine Contact's wormholesFor his 1985 novel Contact, Carl Sagan asked his friend Kip Thorne how a wormhole might work. The book sold 1.7 million copies in two years and became a 1997 film.
- Carl Sagan's Cosmos reached 500 million peopleCosmos: A Personal Voyage, first broadcast in 1980, has been seen by at least 500 million people in 60 countries, and its companion book was the best-selling science book of its time.
- Carl Sagan won a Pulitzer Prize for The Dragons of EdenCarl Sagan's 1977 book The Dragons of Eden, on the evolution of human intelligence, won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and introduced his Cosmic Calendar.
- Carl Sagan gave the public a baloney detection kitIn The Demon-Haunted World (1995), Carl Sagan offered readers a toolkit for critical thinking and popularised the rule that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
- Carl Sagan warned the world about nuclear winterIn 1983 Carl Sagan co-authored the TTAPS study warning that a nuclear war could cool the planet, work honoured in 2022 with the Future of Life Award.
Sources
- Voyager Golden Record Wikipedia
- Carl Sagan Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.